We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Travis Lee Ratcliff. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Travis Lee below.
Travis Lee, appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?
I’ve found that some people treat creativity as a process of waiting for lightning to strike, while others treat it as the amalgamation of a thousand different influences. For me, it has always been the latter.
I find my creativity coming to life through the devoted absorption of what fascinates me.
For many years, this was expressed through my obsessive film-watching life.
Like a lot of filmmakers, I became enmeshed in a world of theater screens, haunting the repertory film scene of Austin, catching retrospectives of master filmmakers, and diving down deep rabbit holes of more obscure film voices.
We’re very fortunate to have one of the most vibrant film-watching cultures in the country here in Austin.
Here, I discovered my passion for both hyper-local Texan filmmakers and emerging international cinemas around the world.
My tastes swing in wildly opposite directions at times, but I am always fascinated by artists who are driven by process over product and whose work captures something essential about the communities they represent.
Lately, my fascinations have shifted from cinema to history and literature, with a recent fixation on uncovering the rich heritage of Texan folk stories.
I find myself motivated these days to go deeper into the source texts of so many of our myths and legends.
What were the stories told at the bleeding edge of the frontier as a new society was being forged in the dusty wagon tracks? What can we divine from our past legends about our contemporary, conflicted, and often paradoxical identities as Texans?
I remember one hot summer afternoon in an old bookstore in Gladewater not far from the house my grandfather was born in I picked up a collection of Frank Dobie’s writings.
Dobie wrote: “Great literature transcends its native land, but none that I know of ignores its soil.”
These days, I think my main objective is to try and understand that soil.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’m a director and editor based in Austin, Texas.
Over the last ten years I’ve been working as a commercial and documentary filmmaker.
I’ve directed commercials for brands that include Frito-Lay, Hershey’s, Shiner, and Yuengling. My documentaries have been featured in film festivals including SXSW, and Tribeca.
I began my career working on film sets around the state as well as contributing film criticism and video essays to online outlets.
My video essays were well received, receiving multiple Vimeo Staff Picks and being featured by outlets such as Criterion, Sight and Sound Magazine, No Film School, and Film School Rejects.
Saturating myself in video essays and film criticism allowed me to build a skillset that ultimately translated itself well towards my transition as a documentary film director.
I think the fusion of my experiences working inside the trenches of independent filmmaking and my late nights working on writing and editing film criticism content led to a kind of natural evolution into my current work as a documentary film director.
As a documentarian I’ve explored the working practices of artists around the world, profiling the sculptor Dony MacManus in my film ‘In the Space Between Ages,’ a shoemaker in Barcelona in my film ‘Zapateria’ and capturing the lives of a collective of coffee farmers in Nicaragua in my film ‘The Hands We Cannot See.’
My most recent film, ‘Dynasty and Destiny,’ is a portrait of Kanesha Jackson a third generation rodeo champion who is training her daughter Kortnee to follow in her and her grandmother’s footsteps. It’s a film that attempts to take the heightened cinematic documentary style we’ve developed following artists around the world into our own backyard here in Texas.
To tell this most recent story we used a combination of film formats, shooting mostly on celluloid (16mm and 35mm) allowed us to craft a visual language that showcases the way legends pass from mother to daughter within a family.
We wanted to make something that reveals the expansive and enduring quality of the traditions of the southwest and captures how many overlooked subcultures make up the diverse tapestry of experiences within the story of Texas.
As a commercial director I’m often taking my expertise at crafting emotionally driven profile films and deploying them in the service of telling brand stories inside of companies. It’s a pleasure to work inside the challenging framework of a commercial setting where the restrictions often lead to creative solutions and exciting discoveries utilizing our craft to solve for the task at hand.
In 2019 I founded the Austin based production company, Movement House, with my producing partner Brody Carmichael.
The two of us, along with our creative partner Emily Basma, have been working to tell commercial and personal stories together under this label ever since.
Our goals are always evolving, but at its core is a desire to build community with our fellow Texan filmmakers, tell personal stories that re-examine this place that we are all from, and find commercial avenues that can help us all expand our working lives as filmmakers.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I’ve tried to foster three things in my life and work: curiosity, community, and collaboration.
If you can remain perpetually curious you will always find ways to re-invent and deepen the craft that you’re engaged with. It is important to have curiosity about the story you’re telling and the characters you’re putting on screen, don’t ever make assumptions about them or fail to believe that they can continue to surprise you.
Build a community of your peers and engage deeply in the audience-community you want to tell stories around.
As filmmakers our work is ideally always going to exist within the context of a community who can use our work as the basis for a conversation.
Foster that conversation outside of your films and be engaged in learning from the storytelling needs of the people around you. Who is being represented? Who is not? Where are their essential gaps in understanding that a film can serve the basis of helping to resolve.
Additionally, filmmaking takes a village. Building a community of your fellow filmmakers and cinephiles is a foundational to being able to get our work on the screen.
And collaboration is at the very core of what we do. My work as a director is largely a job built around finding the right people to help tell the story the way that it needs to be told. Every collaboration is a relationship and learning how to empower those collaborators with the emotional language that expresses the vision we’re all marching towards is really the whole craft of directing in a nutshell.
What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?
Over the last twelve months we’ve taken our new film, Dynasty and Destiny, onto the road to film festivals.
By the time we’ve wrapped up festival season we’re expecting to have screened at around twenty festivals across the world and we we’ll have been able to attend at least half of these in-person in support of the film.
Some of these have included our world premiere at San Francisco International Film Festival where we received the Golden Gate Award, Tribeca, Sidewalk Film Festival, and the Calgary International Film Festival.
This has been the most extensive experience I’ve had with festivals in my career and its yielded a ton of fascinating lessons.
The first has been: festivals really are an extraordinarily powerful way to build relationships and extend your community. Being based in Texas means we are outsiders to the film industry that exists in Los Angeles and New York and over the course of the last twelve months we’ve made dozens of connections that I hope will grow over many years. Regional festivals are often just as powerful as some of the larger film festivals in building these relationships
The second lesson has been that festivals are an opportunity to meet and collaborate with incredible filmmakers who’ve been curated by some of the best film programmers in the world.
Naturally, there are a ton of overlaps in the experiences and backgrounds of your fellow participants at festivals. By focusing more on connecting with my peers in these environments I’m discovering a huge resource that comes from the shared knowledge and experience of all of these incredible film artists working at the same level I am in their careers.
And the third lesson: there is nothing better than sharing your film with a wide variety of audiences. You learn incredible lessons about how your film is working in different blocks, different rooms, and in different festival cultures. These lessons amplify and inform your work in important ways and have gone a long way to shaping the future of the stories we look forward to telling in our films to come.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://travisleeratcliff.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/travisleeratcliff
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travisratcliff
- Twitter: https://x.com/travratc
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@travisleeratcliff
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